There are many tools available for organizing and accessing documents through different interfaces that help users find information. Some of these tools allow users to search for documents matching specific criteria, such as containing specified keywords. Some of these tools present information about geographic regions or spatial domains, such as driving directions presented on a map.
An example of one of these tools is described in U.S. 2002/0078035 A1. That particular tool is a computer system that presents a map interface to a user and that interface enables a user, among other things, to pose a query via the map interface and to be able to inspect a representation of the query results arranged on the map as icons. The map and the icons are responsive to further user actions, including changes to the scope of the map, changes to the terms of the query, or closer examination of a subset of the results. The targets of the query are documents. Examples of documents include text-based computer files, as well as files that are partially text-based, files containing spatial information, and computer entities that can be accessed via a document-like interface. A spatial recognizer process examines documents for spatial information content. When the spatial recognizer determines that a document has spatial information content, the document is added to a spatial document collection. A document ranking process assigns a spatial relevance score to each document in the spatial document collection. The spatial relevance score is a measure of the degree to which the document relates to the spatial location mentioned in its spatial information content.
Such tools are available on private computer systems and are sometimes made available over public networks, such as the Internet. Users can use these tools to gather information.